Good backlinks

Now that you know what backlinks are, what actually constitutes a “good” backlink? What should you be looking for, and what are those SEO tools giving a lot of weight to when calculating a domain authority score for a website?

I’ll lead off by stating that not all backlinks are created equal. In fact, this is one of the main areas where website sellers will try to scam you into thinking you’re getting a better website than you actually are. I’ll elaborate more on one part of this in the next video.

There are several different metrics and aspects that you’ll want to take into account here, but the general gist is that the links should be natural, relevant, and come from high-quality websites that are similar to your website. That’s it!

If I have a blog post about farming mint, and gardening.com links to that post from a blog post of their own about growing different herbs, then that’s probably going to be a very, very good backlink!

On the contrary, if I have that same mint farming post, but it gets a link from GTAVgoldhacks.us on a post that’s clearly spam from a different country, this link will hold virtually no value.

Clearly we want more of the first type of link, and we want to avoid the second type of link!

While Google is extremely complex with their algorithms and I can’t even begin to model their analysis and weight of backlinks, there are several characteristics of “good” links that are just obvious.

Topic Relevance

Good backlinks come from articles that are related to the content that they’re linking to. For instance, a blog post about patio furniture getting links from other blog posts about patio furniture — that’s natural and makes sense!

However, you’ll commonly see spammy links that go from one unrelated source to another, like a gut health blog post linking to a gaming news post.

Natural Anchor Text

Most links are text links, meaning that a word or series of words links to another source. This is taken into account when determining the value of a link, so it needs to be relevant, natural, and varied across all links.

Going back to the patio furniture example, if the patio furniture post were linking to another post about the different types of patio furniture, some good anchor text would be “types of patio furniture”, “patio furniture types”, “different patio furniture”… you get the idea.

Spammy links often either have irrelevant anchor texts or unnatural texts that clearly look forced.

Diversity is also fairly important. It’s common for websites to have many links from different sources, all with the same anchor text. While this isn’t ALWAYS a terrible thing, it’s a sign of manipulation and bad links most of the time.

Source Relevance

This aspect is fairly similar to topic relevance, except instead of looking at a blog post’s topic, you’re looking at the topic of the entire website. If your patio furniture post has a link from another patio furniture post, then that’s good, but if that post is on a website about weight loss, that link’s going to be very low-quality as it’s likely illegitimate.

Same Language

An obvious one here — the anchor text and backlink source should be the same language as your prospective website! It’s natural for a website to get some foreign language links, but many of them can be a sign of link spam and aren’t worth anything.

Make sure you’re not getting baited and switched with a blog post in your desired language but the rest of the website in another language.

Link Target

Where the links are actually pointing to is one last thing to consider! A good, healthy backlink profile is one where many different pages on a website receive links. There are links going to the homepage and a wide array of inner pages. When there are too many links going to one page, then it typically doesn’t spread the authority out well, and it’s also an indication of purchased or low-quality links.